New tax man wants to turn Ukraine into investment bank
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/business/new-tax-man-wants-to-turn-ukraine-into-investment-bank-344568.html
Chief tax collector Ihor Bilous likens Ukraine to a huge investment bank whose main task is to turn a profit.
This is how the newly appointed head of Ukraine’s Tax Service addressed the relevance of his background in investment banking.
His mission is to bring capital in from Ukraine’s murky black market where an estimated 40-60 percent of gross domestic product remains hidden. “Last year, a quarter of the country’s budget was stolen only through frauds involving value added tax,” he says of the legacy his predecessor, Oleksandr Klymenko. Klymenko is now wanted for corruption and his assets have been frozen in the European Union.
There are a lot of platforms for money laundering that had been established by the previous tax authorities, Bilous adds. “We easily can see all the tax pits, as we have all the information,” he adds. All major state companies, including gas and oil monopoly Naftogaz, had been using these tax avoidance pits. More than 30 criminal investigations have already been launched.
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There are 48,000 Tax Service employees, of whom 7,000 are tax police officers. “It is a huge army,” Bilous admits, adding that the staff could be halved and still do the same amount of work.
“That is why people live and work like it is their last day. They do not obey my orders,” laments the tax agency chief. According to Bilous, the agency’s work gets sabotaged from the inside, while it’s difficult to find new hires because the agency is undergoing changes.
Il soigne sa popularité en interne…